With the increasing popularity and media mileage being gained by location-based social networking sites such as Gowalla and Foursquare, it is not surprising that the Facebook people will take notice of this. And this could be threatening to Facebook especially since this location-based social networking services can take away a number  of users from them.

So, what’s the best way to handle this threat? – Facebook decides to offer the same location-based services. NYT Bits Blog is reporting that Facebook is preparing to launch a new feature that will allow users to share their location.  This will be launched in late April, just in time for Facebook’s f8 developer conference.

What this means is that starting April expect to receive status updates from your friends stating their current locations. But of course, sharing location among friends is just the tip of the iceberg.  This new feature could also be the start of a social recommedation feature which eventually would bring in more brand participation Facebook.

This also explains why Facebook updated is privacy policy last November 2009, where part of the policy stated –  “When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.”

Facebook’s location feature will either be through Facebook’s site or through APIs that will be made available to small time developers.

It’s too early to tell whether which of the location-based services will this new Facebook kill. Although according to the report, Facebook is not really eyeing any of these startups but rather a bigger competitor – Google with its small-business advertising program powered by Google Latitude.

I’ve created an Amazon Associate account a long time ago but never get to earn significantly from the referral program. The only time I got a commission from a sales coming from Amazon links from my blog is when a friend click on the link and actually purchase the product online.

Fast forward to now. Amazon Associates has launched a new feature that might actually give us easier way to gain commission. And this feature is called – Share on Twitter. More →

Federated Media Publishing (FM) and Apartment Therapy Media, a network of home-oriented social media sites, announced an exclusive partnership.

Founded by author and interior designer, Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, Apartment Therapy is devoted to helping people make their homes beautiful, organized, and healthy. In April 2004, Maxwell, with his brother Oliver Ryan, launched the site which has since become one of the most popular and influential design blogs in the country.

Apartment Therapy Media represents more than 3 million unique readers and 20 million pageviews per month.

VideoEgg has released AttentionRank, an innovative ad delivery approach to optimize the placement of brand advertising and maximize user attention and engagement. AttentionRank is a systematic approach that identifies when and where users are most receptive to a brand’s message—evaluating media not on an impression basis but on its ability to capture attention. By analyzing three key factors — engagement with the ad, time spent with a brand message and secondary user actions such as click-through rates — AttentionRank enables VideoEgg to understand where to place brand messages to capture user attention, increasing the time users spend with an advertisers’ content by an average of 15 percent.

AttentionRank enables the company to provide brand advertisers more time spent with their content. Having delivered hundreds of brand campaigns, VideoEgg has gained insight into how time on page, ad size and placement, content and user mode influences the attention value of media.

ValueClick Media is introducing ActiveAds, enabling advertisers to tailor banner ad creative for each consumer.

ActiveAds allows marketers to display customized messages in ad creative without the need to develop and manage multiple creative units. Banner ads are dynamically assembled to present a more relevant version of the ad’s text or images based on anonymous information available from the client or ValueClick Media.

ActiveAds provides an efficient way to micro-target the most desirable audience segments while providing consumers with more engaging ads, ultimately resulting in better campaign performance. Unlike some other solutions, all ActiveAds targeting is done anonymously and without any use of personally identifiable information.

Online video management and advertising platform Auditude has secured an additional $10.5 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures along with existing investor Greylock Partners.

Redpoint and Greylock have between them backed market-leading companies such as DoubleClick, Right Media, Facebook and MySpace. Auditude plans to use the new funds to expand its leadership position in video management and monetization for content owners and publishers across the web.

Auditude enables content owners, publishers and advertisers to benefit from the distribution of video on the web. The company combines their highly accurate and patented fingerprinting technologies with a robust ad platform to simplify video distribution and advertising. The company also has partnerships with some of the world’s largest content and publishing companies including MTV Networks, Warner Bros. Entertainment, and MySpace.

Mobile advertising network Greystripe has raised an additional $5.5 million in Series C funding led by its existing investor Incubic Venture Capital, with Steamboat Ventures and Monitor Ventures participating. The company is now aiming to solve the biggest problem in mobile advertising.

Despite massive industry projections around mobile advertising’s growth, many brands and agencies have debated the additional value in creating mobile-centric advertising formats and campaigns. Greystripe is looking to solve this issue by integrating its mobile inventory directly into industry-accepted online media buying software. This integration allows for ad agencies to simply click to add mobile and also allows for Flash advertisements, normally only available on the web, to appear on the iPhone.

AdDogs announced that it is now open for business with more than 9,000 newspapers, trade publications, magazines and web advertising opportunities available for the Advertiser to create and buy advertising. With an initial focus on 25 states, the media available through AdDogs cover an audience in excess of 180,000,000.

AdDogs is a new patent-pending, on-line service and is the first advertising technology platform designed to use the internet to make the process of finding target markets, choosing media serving those markets, ad creation and ad placement into a seamless integrated process.

AdDogs allows an advertiser to create or upload an ad, search geographically and demographically for target audiences, and choose media for placement using flexible search criteria. With the target market defined, the system either guides the advertiser through an ad building process using the experience of seasoned ad agency talent designed into AdDogs, or allows the advertiser to upload a custom advertisement, created specifically to fit a media product for placement through AdDogs. Advertisements created in AdDogs will be automatically resized by the AdDogs technology for insertion in multiple media, each time adjusting the ad to show the advertiser exactly how it will appear in the target media. All ads created and placed through AdDogs will be stored and available to the advertiser for future use.

Tremor Media, the leading online video advertising network and technology provider, today announced it has closed an $18 million round of series C funding. The investment will enable the company to further build its premier video ad network and increase investments in advanced video technologies including Acudeo, the market-leading video ad monetization platform.

Meritech Capital Partners led the funding round along with participation from Tremor Media’s existing investors. Previous funding included investments from Canaan Partners, Masthead Venture Partners, and European Founders Fund. The series C round of funding follows Tremor Media’s third consecutive year of triple-digit revenue growth.

The additional capital will allow Tremor Media to accelerate product development, grow the Acudeo install base, and further expand the footprint of its video network. The company will also continue its international expansion under the leadership of Christian Baudis, former head of Google Germany who was hired in September 2008.

The company received $11 million in series B funding last year.

US music site Jango announced the launch of Jango Music Network (JMN), dubbing it as the world’s largest and most targeted cost-effective ad network for the music vertical.

The current JMN inventory of music sites reach a collective total of 30 million unique monthly visitors in the US alone. JMN also features a unique methodology that maps brand preference to musical taste and uses it to help advertisers target audiences that will be particularly receptive to their brand.

For example, ads run against the unique artist subset for Dodge Truck received a 273 percent higher click-through rate than ads run against the average artist. For Armani Exchange, the lift was 82 percent and for Gevalia Coffee it was 147 percent. Each brand had a completely different subset of artists, some expected, others somewhat unexpected. Dodge not only performed well with Keith Urban but also Justin Timberlake. Armani Exchange was not just favored by fans of Coldplay but also those of John Mayer; Gevalia Coffee shared a strong affinity with Bruce Springsteen but an even stronger one with Leona Lewis.